This paper provides a broad overview of the role that unions have, and have not — played in the unfolding drama of public management reform in the United States. Factors impeding the ability of unions to shape the reform movement are highlighted. Fragmentation of power and even the absence of rudimentary collective bargaining rights in many locations restrict civil servants’ ability to influence the reform agenda. As a result, New Public Management (NPM) initiatives have progressed in a fashion that often works to the disadvantage of public workers. ‘De-privileging’, privatisation, and devolution of public agencies have become almost ubiquitous. The paper concludes with the observation that NPM offers a golden opportunity, if not the obligation, for management and labour to adopt a more cooperative and participatory approach to policy making in the workplace.

The trend towards outsourcing maintenance functions to labour hire firms raises questions about the capacity of unions to maintain membership levels and employment standards amongst an increasingly casualised labour hire workforce. The Victorian manufacturing maintenance sector has experienced substantial outsourcing to labour hire firms, but unions in this sector have maintained membership levels and established enterprise agreements to govern employment of labour hire workers. In 1997, labour hire workers in this sector struck for almost 7 weeks in support of a wage claim. This paper outlines the nature of employment regulation of labour hire firms in Victorian manufacturing maintenance and the factors leading to the 1997 dispute. It analyses how the union organised industrial action and how the employers responded. The conclusion explores some questions about collective action by labour hire workers, and highlights some problems of dispute resolution under the current regulatory regime.

Keeping an open mind on the severity of the financial crisis and its implications for capitalism, this article focuses on the role of the state and financial institutions in monetary regulation. Questioning whether orthodox economic theorists and policy-makers share the same world view as professional and central bankers, it argues that the monetary system has in the past twenty years been stabilised through trust relations, rather than by markets. Furthermore, in this process, which was not sufficiently recognised by the practitioners, such trust relations were unable to cope with the impersonality of money. The nub of the question about a ‘crisis of capitalism’ is how nation-states can possibly control money — the most anarchic and global social relation in the world today. The article questions Keynesianism and economic liberalism alike, by asking if it is possible for states to force global banks to take the risks of lending for development. It argues that the real focus of attention needs to be the practices of complex international banking networks and the way ‘banks march in step’.

The Accord has been a feature of the Labor Government's economic and industrial relations management since 1983. It has had both its critics and supporters. The paper assesses the Accord on a number of economic and non-economic criteria.

This non-refereed article is adapted from the paper presented on 21 August 2009 by Ms Angela Zhang, to the symposium, The Fair Work Act: Promises, Potential, Protections and Pitfalls. This symposium was designed to bring academic analysis together with voices representing low-paid workers. The community organisation Asian Women at Work, based in western and south western Sydney, believes that legislative reform will bring greater fairness at work only if it is accompanied by a concerted multilingual campaign to educate women of their legal rights at work, and their sources of redress. Employer education, union right of workplace entry, and an effective inspection regime are also crucial. The legislated minimum conditions in the National Employment Standards are seen as being set too low to offer real protection. Even if low-paid workers could access the new collective bargaining stream, the Individual Flexibility Arrangements that are mandatory in every collective agreement are likely simply to continue employers’ power to dictate working arrangements. Whilst the Act improves the regulation of unfair dismissal, many migrant women will remain unprotected, because of small business exemptions. Nevertheless, in coming together to lobby and campaign, the women have found a source of strength and power.

There has recently been intense debate about the relative merits of a centralised wage-setting system vis-a-vis a decentralised system. Most of the theoretical and empirical works on this issue focus on the static or current macroeconomic performance in terms of employment and inflation and microeconomic efficiency resulting from enhanced labour market flexibility. Following Lancaster’s work and subsequent extensions by Schott and Vartiainen, this paper regards wage bargaining as a dynamic game involving conflict over the distribution of current and future income. It is argued that the intertemporal decision makings of both workers and employers are influenced by so-called prisoners’ dilemma. In such situations, it is claimed that centralised or corporatist wage negotiations system leads to higher investment rates. This claim is corroborated with evidence from selected OECD countries.

Geoffrey Harcourt remained a steadfast left Keynesian all his life. He applied his economic analysis in framing policy recommendations targeting the welfare of the poor. He undertook incisive and comprehensive surveys of the work of Cambridge post-Keynesians, some of whom were involved intellectually or practically in the economics of developing economies. Keynes, remaining an imperialist as far as India was concerned, nevertheless produced a corpus which has been immensely helpful in understanding developing economies and prescribing policy solutions for them. First, Keynes created the modern macroeconomics discipline and refined the concept of national income, allowing methods of collecting and organising economic and social data enabling assessment of intersectoral impacts. Second, still relevant today is his idea of an International Clearing Union, disciplining countries with excessive balance of payments surpluses or deficits, even though American opposition at Bretton Woods prevented its adoption. Third, although an economist of the short run, Keynes took up issues of vital concern for the development of an underdeveloped economy, departing from his long-held fears about excessive population growth and contributing to policies for stabilising commodity prices. While Keynes remained a Eurocentric imperialist, his dreams for Europe in general and Britain in particular proved relevant for many developing countries today. He supported public investment and state involvement in solving problems of unemployment and industrial restructuring. His analysis of the instability of stock markets and dangers of financialisation remains highly relevant in a world experiencing major stock market crashes in almost every decade since the 1970s.

Since emerging around 2010, maker culture and the maker movement have drawn little attention from digital labour research. This article fills the gap by exploring sociocultural dynamics that have emerged in maker culture, such as how makers in China mobilise their agency to struggle for a path forward to achieve decent work and a better society. The article first reviews research on the Chinese maker community as well as digital labour, in particular the dualism of exploitation and workplace resistance in current digital labour research. It argues that makers, in the case studied, mobilise certain agency initiating from sociocultural dynamics beyond the framework of exploitation. The article then explicates the argument with cases collected from our fieldwork in Shenzhen’s maker community in July–August 2017. It shows makers’ practices originating from the open-source ethos, such as an awareness of sharing and mutual support in moulding a ‘micro-innovation’ model, and in creating products that aim to benefit vulnerable communities and build up a sustainable ecosystem. The article thus turns the current economic discussion on maker culture in a new direction: the sociocultural impact of the maker movement. Furthermore, it suggests that this research on the sociocultural impact fills the gap between existing digital labour research and maker studies.

We introduce a themed collection of articles examining how the public sector has responded to, and been impacted by, the COVID-19 crisis. Although the pandemic has affected the roles, functions, economies, governance and structures of public sectors, this themed collection focuses on public sector employment relations. Authors examine significant areas which have been subject to accelerated change stemming from the pandemic. Building on decades of public sector reform, these changes impact public sector enterprise bargaining, terms and conditions of employment, working arrangements and practices, and the relationship between public servants and their employer. The articles in this collection provide important insights into the longer-term influences of the COVID-19 pandemic for public sector workforces. The collection also raises questions around whether the positive lessons from this crisis can be sustained to help manage serious crises in the future, or whether the public sector will slip back into a state of unpreparedness.

This paper examines the application of the techniques of economic analysis to occupational health and safety regulations using occupational noise as an example.

The paper explores the extent to which economic impact studies are practically feasible and useful in relation to occupational health and safety legislation. Six studies of the same regulatory change, from four countries were analysed. The results of these studies ranged from a strongly negative to a significantly positive net present value, depending on the assumptions made. The factor which had the greatest influence on these differences was the way in which benefits are costed.

It is shown that in the field of Occupational Health and Safety, economic analysis does not produce a single valid net present value or benefit to cost ratio on which a decision to legislate can sensibly be based. However the analysis can, if properly directed provide useful information on factors which will enable organisations to optimise their response to the regulation and authorities to introduce regulations in a way which does not bear with unreasonable weight on specific sectors of the community.

Economists have long thought that an increase in minimum wage rates would lead to higher unemployment of unskilled workers. The higher minimum rates would cause employers to substitute other classes of labour or capital for unskilled labour and to contract output. Situations in which an increase in minimum wage rates will not increase unemployment do not seem to be practically relevant. The results of Card and Krueger have reopened this question. In their major study a survey of fast food outlets suggested that an increase in the minimum wage rate actually increased employment. Unfortunately, closer inspection of their results has not justified the attention paid to their study. The quality of their data is suspect and other data support the traditional view. In addition, the interpretation of their results is very questionable. The new material actually gives economists no reason to revise their traditional view on this subject.

Faced with platforms such as Uber, riders are resisting individually and organising actions such as Riders X Derechos in Spain. Some of these ‘new proletarians’ have even organised themselves into cooperatives. To the global utopia of investor-owned platforms, platform cooperativism opposes the utopia of delivery without exploitation or carbon emissions through local cooperatives owned by riders. Based on the case study of the Mensakas cooperative in Barcelona, this ethnography analyses the link between riders’ protests and cooperative platforms. It questions the concrete effects of ‘counter-platform politics’ and the relationship between politics and labour. It also examines the strategies of intercooperation in the ‘cyclelogistical’ sector to understand the institutional, social, and political conditions that foster the ‘re-embeddedness’ of the bike delivery market.

Throughout the English-speaking world, collective bargaining has commonly been considered to be an option for workers discontent with the default system of management-determined conditions of work. In this article it is argued that, as a universally acclaimed human right, collective bargaining should be considered a minimum condition for everyone employed under standardised conditions of work. The government policy of offering workers a choice to bargain or to refrain from bargaining, in effect in countries such as the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, does not meet that standard. Just as the equity goal of governments is the absence of inequality based on traits such as sex and colour, the government bargaining policy goal should be universal collective bargaining. Anything short of universality should be considered a social problem in search of a more effective policy solution.

In recent years National Wage guide-lines have attempted to facilitate the implementation of a system of “administered flexibility”. The Efficiency and Restructuring Principle adopted in March 1987, and the Structural Efficiency Principle adopted in August 1988, have been the major instruments of this attempt. In different industries and enterprises these principles have resulted in differing outcomes and approaches. In some industries, such as the chemical, steel and aluminium industries, restructuring has taken place at a company and/or enterprise level. In other industries such as metal fabrication, road transport, building and construction, a “blue-print” industry approach has been adopted. This paper examines award restructuring in such a “blue-print” industry.

This paper examines the different types of ideological positions (welfarist, realist, and socialist) and, by extension, the roles that trade unions may adopt in the future. It suggests that a distinction can be made between what trade unions should be, by definition, and what they can be as we move into the 21st Century. It argues that the optimum role that trade unions can assume is one in which they are autonomous, yet choose to work in close partnership with a state which is dedicated to improving the welfare of the citizenry. The rationale for this argument is that a strong state is in a position to garner support for beneficial development programs, while autonomous trade unions can ensure that the interest of members are factored into state policies, even as they seek to enhance their voice and ownership at workplace level. The Singapore case is used as a template to support the arguments generated in this paper.